In the morning I walked across Chris’s campus to his class and was pretty amazed by the sheer size of the place. There must be about 20 basketball courts here, along with an Olympic swimming pool. There are 5000 students and 400 staff in total, so it’s about five times bigger than my high school. Amazingly, the school started with just 20 students about ten years ago! A few people have mentioned that fact to me now and have commented that it’s a great illustration of the boom that China is experiencing.

Chris teaches classes of roughly fifteen 12-13 year olds and each period lasts 40 minutes. He did a reading comprehension exercise about Australia which I thought was nice, and I was impressed by the level of knowledge that the students had about Australia – the capital cities, the animals, and the climate.

Every day the school has a morning exercise period, during which every student goes down to the basketball courts and football fields and does some exercise to music. The music slowly speeds up to give them a good workout, but the kids don’t seem very enthusiastic. It’s a bit like army drill really so I can’t blame them. I haven’t seen any overweight students in the whole school (despite the food in the canteen being dripping with oil) though so it might be effective in helping fight obesity.

Testing… This is a test of the ‘blog this photo’ feature from inside Flickr.

I finally met my namesake, the one backpack that could fit all of my gear AND even fit me too!

This was a stall at the 41st Hong Kong Brands & Products Expo.

Taken 10th December 2006.

I’m normally pretty good with maps, but today’s mission to find the Yesinn Hostel in Hong Kong took me about half an hour of walking up and down the same street – I even walked past the entrance 3 or 4 times without realising!

The directions were excellent from the airport all the way to the block that the hostel was located on, but that still didn’t help! All that I had written down was that it was located on King Street between Power and Oil Streets. Of course the Cantonese pronunciation for each of the street names is different to the Mandarin pronunciation, so half the people I asked didn’t know what I was talking about.

The map looks simple enough, but it only lists a few of the stores that are around here… in addition to the 7-11s and McDonalds, there are about 100 other stores squished in next to each other on King Street, and the door for Yesinn doesn’t exactly stand out. The fact that the only sign was a postcard sized piece of plastic didn’t really help… I was kind of expecting a hostel as big as Sydney YHA! It turns out the hostel is actually just a 3 bedroom apartment with a few modifications…

After asking at a few nearby stores and hotels, I finally found a store that had an internet connection and checked the map again. Maybe next time I’ll just print the directions and map? Wouldn’t be half as much fun though, walking up and down a packed street with a huge backpack on my back and a daypack on my front.

After finding the hostel I had a much-needed shower then grabbed some beef noodles at one of the shops where I asked for help. Then I caught the subway to Central station and checked out the camera stores on Stanley Street. I like the look and feel of the Canon Powershot G7, I just wish it had through-the-lens viewfinding like an SLR. Oh well, at half the price, half the weight and half the size of a digital SLR, I shouldn’t really complain.

If I end up finally making the move to a digital camera, my first assignment is to take some photos of the lack of signage around the hostel and write some better directions.

The Terminal: An eastern immigrant finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.

Here I am sitting at Gate D7 in the new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. It’s 4:50am here, which makes it almost 9am in Sydney, so I can’t sleep. The air conditioning is a little too effective, meaning that the comfortable 24 degrees outside isn’t being let in and I’m forced to sit here with my laptop on my lap and a Thai Airways blanket that I ‘borrowed’ just to stay warm.

I am pretty amazed that I could just turn my computer on though and get online, as well as there being a power outlet just 2m away from the chairs! I don’t remember Tom Hanks getting it that easy.

I tried sleeping, but the very comfortable pillow that Yvie gave me yesterday (obrigado) unfortunately isn’t large enough for my whole body to fit on… The seats here are made from solid steel and laying across three of them isn’t going to make my wait go any faster. Somewhat ironically there’s an advertisement for 500 baht (I think around A$20) massages not far from here.

The steel chairs, whilst not so comfortable, really fit the look of the whole airport. It has a real industrial look to it, with lots of the pipes and tubes being uncovered, and lots of metal framework. Unfortunately I don’t have a digital camera (this may change soon..) so I haven’t taken any photos here, but one great example of the look is on Flickr (thank you liveanoptimisticlife).

Just in the time it’s taken to write this, the airport has buzzed back to life. It seems like 3am to 5am is the only downtime here, with duty free stores and all of the cafes being open at least 22 hours per day.

Probably the most interesting (bizarre?) thing that I’ve seen so far is a number of Korean couples wearing exactly the same outfit… I’d read about it before on some English teacher forums, but I’d never seen it for real… For a second I thought the first couple that I saw were in a sports team together because they were both wearing the same tracksuit… but then I didn’t see any other teammates! I thought it was a bit sad that they not only wore the same clothes, but they also had matching handbags…

Alright, just two more hours until I board for Hong Kong…